"After running a proof of concept in 2007 of possible systems, theschool decided to build its portal with IBM WebSphere and Quickrproducts. It tied six different backend systems, including a studentadministration system running on PeopleSoft software, Blackboard forits course management system and Microsoft Windows Live for e-mail, hesaid.

The school is currently running a pilot trial of 3,000students, and is in the midst of procuring new servers for the finalroll out, which would affect some 13,000 students come February 2010"

"Singapore-based Donut Empire is also jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. The local chain launched a blog site two weeks ago, after a planning period of six months with its Web design company and IBM, according to its co-founder.

Donut Empire also hopes the use of Web 2.0 tools would help itaddress its business objectives such as communicating with itsemployees and franchisees, as well as quicken the response time totheir questions, said Chiew"

“Document-centric collaboration by itself just isn’t enough. You needto have something people-oriented right alongside it,” said Oliver Young, ananalyst at Forrester Research."

“There is pent-up demand among learners for easy-to-use tools thatsimplify the process of connecting a person with the need to know to a personwho knows,” said Rozwell from Gartner

At IBM, 53,000 employees use a homegrownsocial networking tool called Beehive. An IBMer’s Beehive page typicallycontains his or her work history and pictures. “Formerly, you had to walk intosomeone’s office to get a sense of a person,” said Carol Sormilic, an IBMvice president. Beehive works hand in hand with IBM’scorporatewide employee directory called Blue Pages, which surfaced commerciallyin Lotus Connections.

IBM is tying Beehive and Blue Pages intoadditional Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis and the company’s Twitter-likeapplication, called BlueTwit, which has some 2,000 users so far. The companyalso encourages “crowdsourcing,” in which expertise on a given topic issolicited from the social network community.

Have you wondered when people living in remote locations will be able to access the internet? Literally millions of them have basic cell phone but not the fancy ones and very limited internet access...

IBM research lab in India has developed technology that lets mobile phone users create speech driven web site that can listen and respond ...

And you got to read the IBM Enterprise Tagging Services ROI math: http://jisi.dreamblog.jp/blog/1739.html

"IBM’s ETS cost $700k to develop and deploy across theworldwide intranet as a sidebar to a number of key web properties:traditional search engine results, top content pages, and webapplications"

"The ETS team instituted a survey to ask users how thistool helped them. What they found was amazing when you look at it incontext: the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hourssaved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, itamounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms ofproductivity gain. The reusability of this page widget also resulted in$2.4 million in cost avoidance (reimplementing this for each site)."

"many companies, government agencies, and educational institutions canchuck at least some of them. Those based on XP -- or Windows 2000,which still has a huge installed base in government agencies -- canlook to big savings on licensing, hardware, and training costs."

"IBM's Lotus unit will introduce a set of social networking services Monday that functions like a MySpace for office workers and which analysts say marks a renewed challenge to Microsoft Corp.

Peter O'Kelly, a collaboration software expert with Burton Group, said: "This is going to rekindle the competition between Microsoft and IBM, I think IBM is playing offense here... O'Kelly said IBM's Web software could cause many corporate buyers who stopped considering Lotus Notes a decade ago to reconsider their reliance on Microsoft's rival software suite."

Connections combines five components: member profiles, activities, blogs, communities and "dogear" - IBM's word for how users identify and share Web bookmarks with colleagues. Connections uses the popular Web navigation technique of "tagging" to help users track popular discussion topics and figure out who may have expertise on any subject. The software provides a way for individuals to quickly set-up ad hoc groups to collaborate on projects, storing relevant documents, e-mails and Web sites together. Each user can publish blogs to share ideas with colleagues.

"What Web 2.0 has demonstrated is that self-defining communities often do a better job of locating relevant information," IBM software chief Steve Mills said. "This helps with the rapid identification of expertise and experts."

Good news for 16 million Lotus Sametime users and potential new customers. IBM announced the availability of Lotus Sametime 7.5 unified business communications platformearlier this week (Sept 13th 2006).

Based on the open and flexible Eclipse framework, with web 2.0 capabilities, this is indeed a game changing application!

"It's being updated furiously, but Microsoft's once-irreplaceable program now has some viable rivals. ...

Don't expect Vijay Sonty to get any Customer of the Year awards from Microsoft Corp. The chief information officer for Florida's Broward County school system negotiated to pay only $14 per copy this year to outfit 40,000 employees with the Microsoft Office productivity suite. At retail, the bundle of the Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint lists at $399. But for Sonty, even a $14 annual subscription is still too expensive. That's why over the next three years he plans on cutting his Office purchases to 5,000. In its place, he's buying IBM Workplace, which not only includes Office-like applications for employees but also delivers online learning to the district's 274,000 students. His price: $4 per person per year."

"Over time, the software world is expected to move more to online applications. Gartner considers them a serious threat to Office just because they're so easy to use. "For consumers, I don't think you need to pay the premium to buy Microsoft Office anymore," says Credit Suisse's Maynard.

Further down the road, some techies believe productivity applications as we know them will become much less important. Instead of opening separate word processors and spreadsheets, people may tap into those functions within other applications—much as they now use a word processor within their e-mail programs. If that happens, Microsoft Office, rather than the company's customers, will look like the dinosaur."

Finally I asked our own tech guru, Jon Udell, what he thought. On the whole, he thought Microsoft’s disappearance would be a good thing, saying, "I hope it would jump start the kind of competitive innovation we haven’t seen forever."

Well here are top 8 things that come to my mind!

08. No more FUD! I can close shop now :-)

07. End of the era of proprietary formats

06. Imagine the amount of money that gets freed up since customers need not pay Enterprise Agreements!

Forrester has acknowledged this product to be a market leader in http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,39619,00.html. "IBM is leading the XForms movement by working to create an open standard for separating form content and presentation. The product's support for digital signatures leads the market, making it a good fit when such requirements are critical to automating workflows and approvals."

Its all about customer value

Helps to increases developer productivity through team development and reusable form components that include sophisticated presentation, business rules and data model

The browser and rich client based options to build a single eForm is pretty cool, especially with local save and pixel precision printing. We are talking of Web 2.0 type user experience here. No expensive and time consuming programming!

and open standards

It supports the W3C XForms open standard - makes form data immediately available to any system, device or person.